Nothing too exciting about these pages, huh?! Do note, however, that in the
contents page I have included an example of a hyperlink that overrides the
default target frame and specifies "_top" which means it is to replace the
entire contents of the browser window. This would, in our circumstances, have
exactly the same effect as linking to "main.html" with no target specified,
except that as is, the whole frames page will be refreshed.

That's it for the frames page and its contents. If you'd like to see it,
click here.

I mentioned earlier about some misconceptions and tricks of the trade.

Firstly, some folks believe the frames have to have those ugly borders. As you
can see here, that's not the case. You can achieve a clean, seamless look with "frameborder=0".

Secondly, and more importantly perhaps, is the question of search engine
friendliness. The problem is this: you want the search engines to list you, so
they need to be able to read your meta tags and your page content. The page that
everybody is to go to is your frames page (our "index.html") but it has no
content! We can put meta tags into it for those search engines that use them,
but that won't help the spiders that look for content. When they find the
content pages and list them, the visitor will be taken to a page that has no
title and no navigation. Not too useful!

No problem! Here's what you do: put meta tags everywhere! That'll help your
marketing efforts along. "But," you say, "what about those page that you don't
want displayed without their frames page?" This little JavaScript is the answer:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript">
if (self==parent)
{
document.write('<b>THIS IS A FRAME ELEMENT</B>')
document.write('You will be transported to frames in a second')
document.write('<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="1; URL=framepage.html">')
}
</SCRIPT>

This little devil won't allow a page to be displayed without its parent frame!
Replace "URL=framepage.html" with your own frames page name (in our case it
would be "URL=index.html"). Insert this script into every page and each time a
page is linked to, the visitor will be transported to your home page. This is
exactly what you wanted. A little side benefit here: since you have so many
pages that are being spidered, all of which will wind up on your home page, you
are actually building a stronger presence in the search engines.

I know there are some who missed this before, or who didn't recognize its great
value, but this gem has been in one of our tutorials (see
here) for quite a long time!